Trans Inaccessibility is Disabled Inaccessibility

My trans, disabled body doesn’t know the line between disability-related access and trans-related access, if the line exists at all.

I’ve been resting for the last 30 hours or so. I napped yesterday evening, got 10 more hours of sleep, and woke up feeling floaty, dizzy, and sleepy. It hasn’t stopped. I spent the whole day lying on the couch, watching TV or playing video games in short bursts while my energy lasted, but mostly doing nothing at all. I’m writing now only because it seemed too bleak to move from the couch to my bed just to extend my streak of sleeping.

It wasn’t this bad yesterday, but I was exhausted and in more pain than usual. The day before, I ran out of energy an hour or two into my work day, got so sensitive I had to turn off the lights, and maintained a piercing headache regardless.

I’m chronically ill; this isn’t new to me. But what set off this flare was transphobia. A couple of my cis coworkers gave mediocre definitions of “cisgender” while I was facilitating a workshop and no one corrected them. I felt trapped, and when it was time for small-group conversation, I froze, giving a hasty explanation before running away to cry in a small, dark meeting room. With support from my boss, I was able to pull it together and work for the rest of the day. But really, I was gone before I even left the room, and to my extreme frustration, I’m not back from this dissociation yet.

It’s an effort not to fault myself for being so weak. Emotional breakdowns and their physical aftermath are tedious, and I wish I could just opt out. My impulse is to minimize the microaggression. I know my coworkers were well-intended, and their errors were relatively subtle. I try to use this knowledge to make myself feel less deeply about it. It wasn’t that bad, I try to tell myself, so I shouldn’t feel this bad.

It doesn’t work. Deeper down, I know it was that bad. My pain tells me so. I feel unlovable and invalid in my agender, and my body breaks down in accordance with my emotions. When I try to erase my reasons for being hurt, it’s not the pain that goes away — just the explanation.

This is what inaccessibility looks like: being made to leave, disengage, cut back, shut down — and suffer anyway. Trans inaccessibility is emotional inaccessibility is physical inaccessibility is disabled inaccessibility. Casual transphobia wreaks horrors on my bodymind, giving me disability that this space and this work refuse to hold.

I’m frustrated at my own weakness. I want to be an unstoppable force of justice, not someone who runs away, cries and disappears for three days.

Capitalism is ableist, and it teaches us that fatigue is apolitical. If you’re permissibly tired, it’s natural, everyone gets tired, you need some rest, take care of yourself! If you’re tired in a way or to an extent that interrupts production or inconveniences others, then you’re lazy, not trying hard enough, and maybe just innately inferior. How pitiful that your body is just so bad and useless — guess it’s time for you to disappear until you’re fixed!

For people who aren’t tired all the time, it’s easier not to question where else exhaustion might come from. It’s easier to condemn fatigued people to a biological fate of exclusion than to resist cissexism, environmental racism, capitalism, and all the other forms of oppression that leave us so frequently burnt out.

But I am exhausted all the time, and I’m sick of self care. I’m sick of having to spend time healing my wounds instead of mounting a resistance. I’m sick of fighting transphobia with tea and baths and sleep. Self care might help conserve my life and energy, but it won’t stop the onslaught.

I need care from my community. I can’t support myself when I’m so tired already. I need solidarity from people who will understand, and the less I have to explain, the better, because talking takes energy too. I need validation in my transness and reassurance that I have a right to be honored in my agender, even if it’s so frequently violated. I need physical intimacy with people I trust.

My needs are barely being met. My friends and community members love me, but love alone can’t sustain us. We need resources. We need time and energy left over after work, school, moving apartments, transphobia, ableism and everything else that demands our labor. We need affordable housing in decent proximity to each other and affordable, accessible transportation.

Hurting more myself makes me hurt more for my community. I’m tired of us so often being targeted, ignored, made to insulate our oppressors from the grief they cause us. I’m tired of us being denied support by those with more power, being forced to draw from our own insufficient resources or, at best, the limited resources of our communities.

I need cis people to do better, to care more, and to stop creating such huge demand for caring labor from people who are already overtaxed. Stop hurting us. Call us by our pronouns, on the first attempt, every time. Quit projecting your assumptions on our bodies. Learn from trans-produced narratives and guides, but do your own research. Pay us for our labor to teach you. Take your collectively vast resources and use them to educate yourselves and each other. Do the prep work to keep from pushing us out of our shared spaces.

Start helping us. Care about us. Care for us. Make yourselves safe for us to trust. Hold us in our pain and our anger, if we will be held. Let us flee if we need to and ease our way back in when we can.

I need care; I demand access. I will not leave my fatigue at home or my transness at the door.

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